by Lisa Cach
“I should be fine,” she said, and meant it. “No more running scared for me—too, too tiresome.”
He smiled. “Now, there’s a tack I haven’t tried: obvious ennui with the spectral performance. We’ll humiliate the ghosts out of the house.”
“I wonder if that would work,” Megan mused. “Treat them like children having a temper tantrum. Ignore them until they behave.”
“Easier said than done,” Case said.
“I’m sure any parent would tell you the same. But don’t worry, if you don’t have faith in me, at least I’m sure Eric has some grand plan in mind for taking care of your problem.”
“I’m counting on it.” He smiled and disappeared out into the hall.
Megan went to work unpacking and making the bed and found herself hoping that Eric really did have something planned. Because the thing about children behaving badly when ignored was that the behavior usually got a heck of a lot worse before it got any better.
Megan made her way downstairs and explored a bit until she found the library.
Case sat on a wooden chair at the one big table in the room, the table’s surface covered in papers and folders and rolls of blueprints.
“Hey. Everything okay upstairs?”
“All clear, chief, and in tip-top order,” she said, and touched her forehead in salute. “No signs of ghosts. Maybe they wore themselves out with yesterday’s display.”
“Does that happen?”
“Heck if I know. Neither I nor anyone else has enough experience with active hauntings to say what’s normal and what’s not.”
He dragged another chair over to the table, putting it beside his. “Sit. I have some stuff to show you.”
Megan’s eye was caught by the books on the shelves. “I assume this is that library of the occult you were talking about?” she asked, moving toward the books and examining their covers. Many of them were leather or cloth and looked as if they’d come from an earlier time, but there were just as many that still wore faded dust jackets, as well as dozens of spine-creased paperbacks mixed in with the rest. “How’s this organized? Or is it?”
“Haven’t thought to look.”
Megan scanned over a few titles:
The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft
Witchcraft through the Ages
The ABCs of Witchcraft
A different shelf offered:
Demons
Demons II
Demonology for Beginners
By subject, apparently.
“Feel free to read whatever you think might be useful. I was going to clear them all out of here, but when strange things started happening, I decided to put it off, in case there was something I could learn in those books. I read a few and can’t say I was impressed. I even tried a few of the things they suggested, for what that was worth.”
“Like what?”
His face colored. “Burning a sage smudge. Having the house blessed. Sprinkling holy water around the place and telling the spirits to leave, that it was my house now.”
“Any effect, good or bad?”
He shook his head. “No, of course not. If there really are ghosts, I imagine they thought it a very good joke.” He frowned. “But come to think of it, yesterday, while I was having my heart attack, something seemed to get mad when I told it to go to the light.”
Megan giggled.
Case cracked a smile. “It worked in Poltergeist.”
“A doctor would tell you that the dark tunnel and the light are an effect of oxygen deprivation on a dying brain.”
“Is that what you think?”
“Pretty much. I imagine it’s the last thing the living consciousness sees before reaching the Other Side. It’s not that they’re going into the light; it’s that the light is a sort of Last Chance for Gas for Eternity sign-post they go by, then poof, they’re dead.”
“Poof?”
“Well, you know.”
“What about all the loved ones meeting them there?”
“I hope that’s true. But even I sometimes wonder, is it again just an effect of the brain dying? Maybe emotion and long-term memory are the last things to go, as they often are in people with dementia. My mother knew someone who had Alzheimer’s, who lost everything except the ability to say ‘I love you.’ She would say it again and again and again to her husband when he came to visit her.”
“Christ, I don’t know whether that’s a happy story or a painfully sad one.”
“I think it’s both.”
“Remind me not to get old.”
“Maybe you’ll be lucky.”
“And die young?” he asked.
She laughed, sitting down in the chair he’d pulled over for her. “No. Maybe you’ll have a healthy old age.”
“You ever get a sense about that with people? I mean, whether or not they’ll have a long life? Whether death is imminent?”
Megan saw the edge of a photograph under a stack of papers and pulled the picture out. “Sometimes.”
“Is there a dark cloud hanging over them or something?”
The photo was of the house sometime before the turn of the century, judging by the horse and buggy. “No cloud. When I first meet them, there’s a sort of flicker when I look at them, like a lightbulb about to go out. It’s just for a moment, and then they seem like everyone else. I saw it in my mom, before she was diagnosed with cancer.” Megan looked up at him. “I tried to persuade myself I was wrong. I thought I had been, when months went by and nothing happened.”
She looked back down at the photo. “The garden was lovely.”
“You can just see that statue,” he said, and pointed to a small white spot in the background. “Er…I didn’t flicker when you met me, did I?”
“I thought you didn’t believe in that type of thing.”
“I don’t. Never mind.”
She laughed. “No, you didn’t flicker.”
“Good. I plan to be a grumpy old fart someday, arguing politics with bored whippersnappers on the back porch. And you? What will you be doing?” he asked.
“Baking cookies and nagging my husband to take his heart medication.”
“You’ll marry a man with heart problems?”
Embarrassment flooded her. She hadn’t been thinking, she just said what popped into her mind, only Case was obviously on her mind. “Or nagging him to take his prostate medicine.”
“That’s no good. He’ll be waking you up every two hours when he gets out of bed to go to the bathroom. You’ll be better off with the heart problem guy.”
“Mmm. Are there any more photos?”
He pulled over a file and opened it. “These are the ones I came across while cleaning out the rooms. There are probably ten times as many hidden around the house. There are several locked chests and desks and no sign of the keys. I didn’t want to force them.”
Megan opened the folder.
The first photo looking up at her was a formal portrait of two teenage girls, hair down in ringlets, big bows on the sides of their heads. One was slightly taller than the other, her features more well defined, her body showing the curves of womanhood. She had a lovely face and bright eyes and an eager curve to her slightly parted lips.
The other girl, a bit younger, was just as pretty or even more so, but her eyes had a narrow look, her lips set in a straighter line. She looked like a troublemaker, although perhaps also more intelligent than the older girl. The older girl looked like the type who needed a father’s watchful, protective eye to stay out of harm’s way—that harm’s way being lustful young men. The younger girl looked as if she’d castrate any man who tried to take advantage of her.
Megan flipped the photo over and read the inscription:
Easter, 1896
Isabella, 18
Penelope, 16
“The sisters,” Megan said.
“Quite a pair, eh?”
“They were beautiful.”
A draft rustled the papers on the table, then died away.
> Megan and Case exchanged glances. Megan set the photo aside and went on to the next. It was from an earlier date, a married couple, the large bearded man sitting, his tiny, doe-eyed young wife standing beside him, her head topping his by only a couple of inches. Her tightly laced corset made her look as if all her soft parts were being extruded out of a metal form. She didn’t seem to mind it, though; the same soft, eager smile that played on Isabella’s lips played on hers. Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Smithson, 1880, the back said.
“He’s the one who built the house,” Case said.
“His wife’s a doll.”
“They look a bit like a bear and a chipmunk, don’t they?”
Megan giggled. “I really don’t want to picture how their daughters were conceived.”
He groaned. “Thanks for the image.”
She grinned, but then the grin faded. “It’s probably their bed upstairs, don’t you think?”
“Unless one of the sisters married and moved in there after their parents were gone. And the bed could have belonged to someone else before that.”
Megan shook her head. “I’d guess it belonged to these two, almost exclusively.”
She set that picture aside and went through the others. There was one more of the house from the outside, this time taken from the backyard, facing the back of the house. As with the other picture of the house, everything looked strangely clean and stark, because the vegetation had been no more than low shrubs and an occasional spindly young tree, all separated by expanses of shorn lawn. No vines clambered up the drainpipes; no ivy obscured the walls of the yard.
“It all looks so new and raw,” she said.
“I’ve seen pictures of this hill when all the development was going on, in the 1880s. It looked just like housing developments do now: scraped earth and houses sticking up out of it like tree stumps. The garden may be a mess now, but at least the tall trees soften the house’s presence in the landscape.”
She nodded and thumbed through the rest of the photos. There were several of people, their names and the dates written on the backs. None of the names meant anything to Megan. Some of the pictures gave intriguing hints into what the house was like in its glory. There were no newer pictures, though, no snapshots of later eras. “You didn’t find anything more recent?” Megan asked.
“No, not yet. I didn’t go through the sisters’ rooms, though.”
“It’s like time stopped in this house,” Megan mused, spreading out the photos in front of her. “It seems there should have been so much more life lived here than this.”
“Maybe you’ll find hints of it elsewhere. God only knows what’s stuffed in those other two bedrooms. One thing I did find was a set of original house plans.” He unrolled a large tube of paper and weighted its corners with books. “Found it in the newel post of the main staircase. Lots of home owners put their house blueprints in the newel post. I don’t know why.”
“Maybe so people who come along later, like you, know where to find them.”
“Maybe.” He put his index finger down on a square on the paper. “This is where we are.” He traced a route down the other hallway, the one she’d not yet explored. “Kitchen is here. Dining room here. Grand salon.” He pointed out all the main rooms.
“Can you imagine the housework? I wonder how many servants they had.”
“There were servants’ quarters up on the third floor. The attic is something else, too. There’s a cistern up there for rainwater, but it’s empty. Someone must have shut it down once city water was put in. If it’s solid and not lined with toxic metals, I plan to put it back into use for yard irrigation.”
“Going green?”
“Only to avoid going broke. Anyway, I’d better get dinner started. You’ll find me here,” he said, pointing again to the kitchen on the map, “when you’re done going through this stuff.”
“Okay.”
She watched him go and listened to his footsteps move down the corridor. The room fell quiet, and her senses heightened, picking up the slight drafts of air on her skin, the shadows on the walls, the distant creaks and pops and groans of the old wood house. She could feel the heat of the big light on its stand and imagined she could hear it buzzing; or perhaps that was the buzzing in her own ears.
A tingle crept up Megan’s neck, an awareness that there might be someone else in the room with her. She looked slowly around but saw nothing unusual in the shadows and the glare of light.
“I want to know who you are,” Megan said softly. “Who are you? Why are you here?”
A draft rustled the papers and photos again.
“Is the answer in these?”
She waited, but there was no answer, no breeze of affirmation.
She picked up a handful of papers and glanced through them. Tax statements, work orders and receipts for the house, insurance documents, letters from a law firm, papers pertaining to businesses the family had owned or in which they’d held stock. It was all jumbled together, mid-century papers mixed among those that were older.
What a mess. Investigating the past was going to be a full-time job.
She sighed and put the papers down, then turned to the books on the shelves. To her delight, she found a battered copy of William Hope Hodgson’s Carnacki the Ghost Finder. They were delightfully spooky ghost detective tales from the turn of the last century, with half—but not all—of the ghosts turning out to be fakes, much like the villains in an episode of Scooby-Doo. She’d take it up to her room for bedtime reading, and to remind herself that not every draft was a ghost going by.
Half an hour later, tired of the dust and mildew of old books and their naive discussions of ectoplasm and rappings on tables, Megan left the library with Carnacki in hand and made her way to the kitchen, following the sound of a baseball game on the radio.
The kitchen was a surprise. She’d been expecting peeling linoleum and sagging cabinetry, maybe a range that looked as if it belonged to some time before the First World War. Instead, she saw a room stripped down to the studs.
A few functional pieces sat like islands in the lath-and-plaster gloom: a refrigerator and a propane range, both about ten years old, and a freestanding commercial stainless-steel sink with drain boards to either side. Pots, dishes, and nonperishable food were crammed onto freestanding metal shelves. The farm-style table in the center of the room was plainly office desk, food prep space, and dining table. An oil lamp was burning in the center of the table.
“Wow. You’re really camping out here, aren’t you?” Megan asked.
Case turned around from the sink, where he was peeling potatoes. “What? Oh, yeah.” He gestured at the walls with a half-peeled potato. “It’s not so bad. I’ve got what I need, and it’s not as filthy as it was before I tore everything out. I don’t think anyone had cleaned the place since the fifties.” He grimaced. “It wasn’t appetizing.”
“Can I help?” she asked.
“No, you’re my guest. Have a seat. Would you like a glass of wine?”
“Are you having one?”
“Sure. Red or white?”
“Either.”
He opened a bottle of red and poured out the glasses. Megan twiddled the stem between her fingertips as the glass sat on the table in front of her, feeling uneasy. How had she gone so quickly from having met him only once to staying in his house?
“You ever go to Mariners games?” she asked.
He glanced over his shoulder at her. “Maybe once a year. Why?”
“Just wondering. Do you ski?”
“Used to, downhill. But then I messed up my knee. I’ve been meaning to try cross-country but never get around to it. You?”
She shook her head.
He carried his potatoes to the table and the cutting board there, chopping them into cubes.
“I bike,” she offered. “Not racing. Just cruising around.”
“You ever try that old railroad grade over along the Cedar River?”
She shook her head, and they talked abou
t routes they liked and favorite places around the city. They chatted like strangers at a party, filling time, being sociable and avoiding personal and ghostly topics.
Case opened a box of curry concentrate and broke the cubes into the large pan of vegetables and meat he now had cooking on the stove. “Gourmet bachelor fare,” he told her, holding up the box.
“It smells good.”
“Thanks.” He turned the heat off under a pan of rice, and a few minutes later, the food was on the table, and they tucked in.
“It’s not bad,” Megan said, trying to be kind.
“Good. I have fourteen more boxes of it.”
“I could cook dinner if you’d like.”
He laughed. “No, you’re free to make anything you want for yourself, but you’re not here to be my chef.”
She shrugged, happy enough to have her offer refused.
“How did you get into being a medium, anyway?” Case asked, serving himself a second helping of rice.
The lights flickered and went out. The refrigerator kept humming, the baseball game continued softly, but they sat now in a pool of light cast by the oil lamp.
“It happens every night,” Case said softly. “I try not to notice.”
Megan nodded, eyes wide. She really did not like the dark.
“Did you ‘see dead people’ from the time you were a child?” Case asked in his normal voice.
Megan shook her head, doing her best to follow his lead despite being unnerved. “It’s not like in the movies. I don’t suddenly see dead people standing in front of me. I don’t hear them say things in plain English.
“My mom told me that the first time she knew there was something different about me was when I was three. She’d taken me to an estate sale at a big house in Laurelhurst, and I picked up a silver hair-brush and said I wanted it for my kitty.
“Mom told me that was silly, that the brush was for a lady, but she says I kept insisting that no, it was for kitties.
“An acquaintance of the deceased was at the sale and overheard us and told my mom—in some shock—that the woman whose brush it had been had indeed used it exclusively for her cats. It had been thoroughly cleaned, of course. There was no sign of cat hair on it.”